Gifts of Grace: Where the Rubber Meets the Road

This is part 15 of a sermon series on Ephesians. Last week we looked at Ephesians 5:17, “Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is,” and I said that foolishness referred to a willful lack of knowledge, or being clueless. We might not know God’s plans for us perfectly, but that alone doesn’t make us foolish. Rather, if we refuse to consider what God would have us do, if we know that place in our lives where God wants to work with us and we ignore him (or worse yet, play dumb): that’s foolishness. That kind of foolishness will be the end of us, if we let it.

There are those places where God’s plans require work or sacrifice, places where God’s will is not politically correct, places where we almost instinctively resist following God’s call. Those are the places where we are likely to make foolish decisions, and we are hitting one of those places today.

Ephesians 5:21-24

Commentary

v21 In the Greek, v21 is not a full sentence, as it appears in the NIV; rather, v21 is the final clause of v18-21—one sentence, one complex thought, in Greek. I think that’s why the NIV puts v21 in the section with the previous verses, even though it seems more closely related to the verses that follow. I encourage you to read v18-21 and v21-24 (or better yet, v21-33) and decide for yourself where v21 fits best. [1]

“Submit” is certainly a key word in the text. Submission means “come into line” or “place under.” Submission does not mean obedience; however, obedience may result as a fruit of submission. (See the text box for how the NT uses the word elsewhere.)

v21-22 In order to counterbalance the apparent demands for obedience that the word seems to imply, it’s important to know that the Greek in these verses does not command submission. A better translation of v21-22 might be:

… submitting yourselves to one another out of respect for Christ, [2] wives to your husbands, as onto the Lord

The point is that submission is the fruit of something else: Spirit-filled living. Here submission is not the main spiritual act but rather something that happens as foolishness is put aside in favor of seeking God’s plan for our lives. Submission, therefore, is here perhaps better understood as a spiritual discipline rather than a moral demand.

v23 The other key words in these verses are “head” and “savior.” These words are used here in a parallel construction: Christ as the head of the church helps us understand Christ as the savior of his body (the church) and vice-versa. We will look at savior next week as a part of a husband loving his wife even as he loves his own body. (Mothers, can I put in a plug for coming to church next week? The main point is going to be, “Husbands, love your wives!”)

Headship is a very misunderstood term. In the 1st Century, intellect & emotions were thought to originate from the heart, the diaphragm, and the guts; nobody would have thought of the head as “the brains of the body.” Therefore, when husbands claim to be the spiritual head of the family, they err if they believe that they get to make all the decisions. Headship, rather, denotes the lead, or cutting edge. The prow of a ship was called its head, and the Hebrew New Year celebration was called the head of the year (“Rosh,” as in Rosh Hashanah, means “head.”) By this logic, Christ is not the brains of the church, but the prow, the leading edge of the church—does that fit?

v24 The NKJV is a better translation inasmuch as this conclusion is not a moral command as much as a descriptive analogy:

Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

Application

I am not comfortable preaching on this topic. I am not comfortable, because these verses have been preached badly and have been used to justify all sorts of evil: domestic abuse; male chauvinism, and the like. I am not comfortable, because—much as I can argue about the interpretation, much as I would like to twist the words to a form that I can stomach—nevertheless I am constrained to preach what I understand the words to say. I am not at liberty to call black, white. I am not at liberty to skip a portion of Scripture that I wish did not exist.

In my mind, women & men are equal. Genesis says of the original order of things, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male & female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). In my mind, in the ideal world, today’s verses cause no problem, because we are all supposed to submit to one another out of respect for Christ (v21). In the ideal world, this would simply work, and we all know of marriages where the couple cares for, and submits to, each other so tenderly that we wish that it could have been the same for us, or our parents, or our children.

We resist the straightforward interpretation of today’s verses because they are politically incorrect and because we know the perils in this world of submitting to anybody: governments, masters, parents, husbands. And yet Paul says submit to the established order of things.

The good news is that today’s verses don’t mean quite what we think they mean. Let’s see what we can conclude and agree on:

1. In a fallen world, nothing—neither governments, masters, parents, nor spouses—are 100% trustworthy. In a fallen world, authority is prone to because abusive. Paul is not advocating staying in an abusive relationship. Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus. One must assume that his audience is genuinely interested in realizing a Spirit-filled life. Healthy submission and authority can only arise from that lifestyle. Even so, we are human and will stumble at times.

2. Headship has nothing to do with brains & decision-making. Headship has more to do with the direction, the tone, or the leading edge. After Adam & Eve ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good & evil—the tree from which God told them not to eat—God said, in part, to Eve, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" (Gen. 3:16b). This was not so much a curse as a description of what a fallen marriage would look like. So where the husband, the head, is on straight, the marriage will tend to go in the right direction; where the husband has his priorities wrong, the marriage will tend toward spiritual ruin.

3. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul instructs Christian women not to divorce their non-Christian husbands and for Christian couples not to view celibacy as more spiritual than marital intercourse. In a marriage where one spouse is more spiritual than the other, the temptation is always to scorn the lesser spouse, to wish they were more enlightened, and even to consider divorce as a way to be free to live an unfettered Christian life. I wonder if Paul isn’t advocating something like that here. Submission, then, becomes:

1st, an act of commitment (versus divorce),

2nd, an act of support and building up the other (remember all those verses
about building up the other parts of the body?),

3rd, an act of trust, both in the husband and in God—that God is in control, and can even use a lame-brain, or a poor provider, or a boor to care for the wife, and

4th, an act of love, caring for the husband as if caring for Christ.

We talk about—in Christ—loving the unlovable, and in the abstract that’s easy. However, marriage is where the rubber meets the road and the abstract becomes concrete. Wives, speaking for husbands everywhere, I know that we can be pretty unlovable—we can be uncaring, self-centered, boorish, blunt, and autocratic … and that’s on a good day. Submitting to a spouse is a spiritual act of worship … of God, not of us (Romans 12:1)! (Oh dear, please don’t worship us—we are not worthy!—but please don’t scorn us either.) Speaking for husbands everywhere, most of the time we do not want to be the head; we would just as soon remain, like Peter Pan, forever a boy; we know we are not to be trusted, we do some of our vilest work when you trust us … and yet we want the chance to love you and serve you and be worthy of your trust.

Notes to husbands:

If you are smart, do not try to go farther than that last paragraph. Too much evil has been done in the name of spiritual headship. Even Jesus—the head of the church—doesn’t presume to call the shots: "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does." (John 5:19)

Next week we will look at how you are to love your wife. The bar, the standard for you to meet, is much higher than the wives’ standard. They only have to submit. You have to lay down your life.

Points to Ponder

What comes to mind when you hear the word “submit”? Where has submission to government, parent, or spouse … or God … been a problem for you?

Usually we have little problem submitting to an authority that we respect. Consider 1 Cor. 12:22-23:

Those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty.

Could it be that submission to a less-than-perfect husband is an example of according him special honor in order to support him, to build him up, to bring him along in becoming what you’d like him to be?

End Notes

1 - When I laid the sermon series out way back in December, I read all of Ephesians in English and sat down with a calendar and laid out a series of sermons for 5-6 months. In seminary, part of developing a sermon is to determine where a particular topic starts and stops—sometimes it’s not always clear. Personally, I think v21 is more the introduction for 5:22-6:9 than it is a summary for 5:18-20, but your opinion might vary. Interestingly, the punctuation in the King James Version for 5:18-21, does match the original Greek, showing it all as one long sentence. The KJV is usually a good translation for preserving the word order and punctuation found in the NT manuscripts from which is was translated. However, over time, as the English language, grammar, and vocabulary has changed, the KJV is not the most readable; also, since the manuscripts used for the KJV translation are not the oldest and most reliable manuscripts, one is left wondering of a faithful but hard-to-read rendering of a 12th-Century manuscript is better than a readable rendering of a 3rd-Century text.

2 - Actually, literally “out of fear for Christ,” but mentioning that above would have been a distraction. Biblically, fear frequently means something like “reverential awe” or “healthy respect.” When I work on the electrical wiring of my house I fear—I have a healthy respect for—the power that I am playing with. So it is when we approach God.